Just finished the Amex data engineering loop, here's what…

Just finished the Amex data engineering loop, here's what actually happened

de_derek · 5 replies

Wrapped up my Amex loop last month, got an offer, accepting next week. Figured I'd leave a real account here since the info online is weirdly sparse for a company this size.

The rounds: recruiter screen (30 min, mostly resume walk + logistics) hiring manager behavioral (45 min, almost entirely STAR-format questions) technical panel: two back-to-back 45-min sessions. one was data modeling / architecture discussion, one was SQL and a short pipeline design question final behavioral with skip-level and a peer from the team

The technical sessions were not LeetCode. It was more like a senior engineer explaining a business problem and asking how I'd design the ingestion and transformation layer. I drew on whiteboard (virtual), talked through tradeoffs. They cared a lot about reliability and cost, which makes sense for a company running at Amex's transaction volume.

Behavioral questions that came up: a time I had to disagree with a stakeholder and still deliver, how I handle a pipeline that broke in prod at a bad time (they liked my on-call story from a previous role), and one question about how I collaborate with analysts and data scientists upstream.

One thing that surprised me: the interviewers were genuinely curious, not adversarial. More collegial than I expected from a big financial company. The team I'm joining does real-time fraud signal work which is actually interesting infrastructure.

Happy to answer specifics in the replies.

5 replies

ds_dmitri

thanks for the detail. the pipeline design round, did they give you a specific dataset/volume context or was it more open-ended? asking because i have an Amex DS loop coming up and trying to gauge how prepared to be on the infra side vs. just the modeling side.

de_derek

they gave context, yes. something like 'we process X billion transactions per day, we need to detect anomalies within 200ms.' numbers were illustrative but it grounded the conversation. i don't think they expected perfect cost estimates, they wanted to see that you ask clarifying questions and reason through the constraints. if you're a DS you probably won't get the same design prompt but expect at least one question about how you'd deploy or operationalize a model.

corp_refugee

the 'disagree with a stakeholder' question is basically universal in big fintech. the move is to be specific about the disagreement (not vague like 'i pushed back'), show that you listened to their view, then describe the outcome including if you were wrong. amex interviewers have seen a thousand polished 'i was right and everyone thanked me' stories.

visa_vik

did they ask about sponsorship during recruiter screen or later? i'm on OPT and trying to decide whether to even apply.

de_derek

recruiter asked in the very first call. amex does sponsor H1B for certain roles, i'd check the specific job listing. mine said 'sponsorship available' explicitly. don't assume either way, just ask on the first call.